Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals: Strategies for Getting Published by Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler (review)

When I first picked up a copy of Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler’s Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals: Strategies for Getting Published, I thought, ‘Oh no, not again.’ I had perused the promotional text on the back cover, scanned the table of contents, read the acknowledgements and introduction, and flipped through the rest of the book. I spotted unstylish and untrue (and ungrammatical) text in the promotional blurb, saw references there and in the introduction to the clichéd ‘secret business of academic publishing’ and the academic ‘writing game,’ and noted invocations of Foucault and Bourdieu. I wondered, ‘Is this a how-to book or an academic book?’ The authors, I felt, were overly self-consciously attempting to make a contribution to their own scholarly discourse communities in sociology (Thomson) and sociolinguistics (Kamler) and, in the process, seemed to be overlooking the immediate needs of the individuals in their target audience—‘early career’ scholarly writers who are ‘relatively new to academic publication’ (3). I imagined that readers who picked up this book would be craving ‘tips and tricks’ (8), not theories about scholarly writing and discursive practice.

But then a curious thing happened. After some weeks of going about daily life—during which I reviewed manuscripts and revisions submitted to education journals; corresponded and spoke with Brian Ellerbeck of Teachers College Press about, inter alia, why a social science thesis or dissertation does not make a ‘good’ academic book; evaluated a book manuscript submitted to a (different) university press; and even did a bit of scholarly writing myself—I returned to and re-engaged with the Thomson and Kamler text. I found, in reading the whole work, an enlightened perspective that spoke to the struggles I had witnessed in the scholarly writing I had recently reviewed. I found, too, that the authors explained the contexts that had likely created the source of my frustrations with those texts. Ultimately, Thomson and Kamler gave me not only a vocabulary and framework for understanding potential weaknesses of scholarly manuscripts but also an arsenal of approaches for helping early-career writers overcome these shortcomings.¹ My opinion of this book vastly improved.

Thomson, professor of education at the University of Nottingham (UK), and Kamler, professor emerita of education at Deakin University (Australia), have authored a text that sits at the nexus of the how-to and academic genres and dutifully demonstrates how co-authored texts can have a unified voice.² Their work will be valuable to early-career writers in, particularly, the social sciences who wish to understand both the theoretical—how writing shapes scholarly identity and how scholarly writing functions within specific discourse communities—and the technical—how to craft scholarly manuscripts that make clear contributions, how to engage editors and reviewers, how to collaborate effectively, and how to build ambitious and wide-ranging publication agendas. In fact, Thomson and Kamler convincingly argue that one cannot understand the technical aspects without putting them into a proper (that is, discipline-specific) theoretical framework. Academics, I agree, should not look for quick fixes in their scholarly lives and work; rather, they should seek understanding. If the peer-reviewed journal article is ‘a building block to a scholarly working life’ (161), and ‘sustained writing is a hallmark of academic life’ (163),³ academics should engage deeply with the discursive, social, personal, and intellectual contexts and processes of scholarly writing. This book encourages that engagement for the purpose of sustaining a life of writing.

In taking what they call a ‘pedagogical approach to academic writing’ (9), the authors shed light on one reason why a volume such as theirs is needed: the apparent rarity of doctoral students writing...